This new analysis from Attendance Works and Everyone Graduates Center shows how many schools across the nation and in every state face high levels of chronic absence. Almost 10,000 schools, or one out of every 10 schools in the nation, have extreme levels of chronic absence affecting 30 percent or more of their students.

School breakfast can improve attendance!
Eating school breakfast increases student attendance by an average of 1.5 days of school per year.

Attendance at school is essential for academic success. Yet, chronic absenteeism (missing 10% of more of school for any reason) is negatively impacting the lives of hundreds of thousands of California kids.

This brief is designed to help district decision-makers in California think about how they might collect and use chronic absence data, with an emphasis on leveraging their Student Information Systems (SIS) to support this work. It lays out approaches to maximize the opportunities presented by recent changes at the state and federal level, including CALPADS new attendance data collection for 2016-17 school year, and new chronic absence reporting requirements in the Every Student Succeeds Act. The brief also provides suggestions for how to best leverage SIS providers for tracking, analyzing, disseminating, and using chronic absence data to develop strategies to reduce chronic absenteeism among students.